Losing Emmy – Excerpt

Emmy and Charlene are twenty-one year old twins. They are connected by sharing the same genes, the same hairbrush, even the same bed, but they couldn’t be more different in personality or ambition. Emmy is delicate and feminine whilst Charlene is more of a goth. With Charlene being the older twin by little more than a minute or two she is the protector, having always fixed her sister’s problems, but now Emmy is dying of cancer and it’s the one thing Charlene can’t ever fix.

“Losing Emmy” is a story that is touching and bittersweet. It highlights life’s joyful and crushing moments, plus those that will forever remain unwritten between the margins of abandoned diary pages. The girls show us that life and death are also ‘twins’. That death can never eradicate love, and finally, what lives deep inside us always finds its way back home.

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Emmy’s life now hangs precariously on a string which continues to fray little by little each day and we both know that when your time is up, it’s up.

That word death leaves most people quivering in fear, but for Emmy and I, it’s been a long awaited visitor who hasn’t quite decided exactly when he’ll walk in the door. Actually, some days we thought he was closer than others. It was that particular faceless beast that taught us that life is something you cling to breath per painful breath, especially when it is crawling towards you a hell of a lot faster than you anticipated.

Just eight weeks ago Emmy and I were seated together in a stuffy windowless office when the cold, harsh, reality was delivered to us by Dr Sentoya, her radiologist. He is a broad-shouldered man with an impressive crown of white hair which somehow hilariously contrasts the thick dark hair on his arms. The man also dribbles a little when he speaks.

He presented himself as some almighty God that morning, as if he was about to deliver a verdict on Judgement Day.

Emmy and I waited with our hands tightly clasped together. I couldn’t look at her face so instead I focused my gaze on a half eaten bagel that was sitting on his desk. My eyes also searched for the obligatory framed photo of a beaming wife clasping a couple of kids; but there was none. A thought crossed my mind… maybe this guy would never know the pain of losing a child.

He tapped his pen three times on a sheet of paper, then flung words across the desk that hit us both like bricks.

‘I’m so very sorry. We’ve done everything we can. There is nothing more we can do.”

Her hand instantly tightened its grip on mine but there was no change in her expression. We had both known that the last batch of treatment really was her last hope. We had literally clung on to it like a child might cling to a brick wall with short stubby fingers, in the hope of reaching the ball when it is just within his grasp. Emmy’s ball fell on the wrong side of the wall that day.

I drove home straight after that meeting, shaken and stunned. The sky was glorious and the rich green fields looked beautiful on either side of us, yet Emmy couldn’t even look up from her lap. I wasn’t sure whether she was just trying her hardest to block out the pain, or if she had been rendered speechless and devoid of any feeling at all. Her catatonic state made me want to lean over and shake her shoulders so hard; just so she would scream, or cry, or something.

Just finally let it all out.

‘It’s okay to feel whatever you need to feel,’ I had whispered. ‘It’s okay to do that now, Emmy.’

But she wouldn’t.

And she still hasn’t.

Emmy’s suffering would soon be over and that’s when mine would begin. I still don’t know what’s coming next or how I’m going to live without her because there is no study or guide book I can buy to teach me that.

When I think about life without my sister, my mind can’t seem to connect the images which it has so painstakingly tried to re-arrange and prepare. Nothing I envisage feels right or possible, or real. My life feels like a dot-to- dot puzzle without the numbers that tell me which direction I need to go in.

On that long drive home I had stared at the windscreen in silence, totally cut to pieces by the fact that I truly didn’t know how I was going to get through this.